One-time notifications

Facebook Messenger provides a way to contact a user after the 24-hour window using one-time notification requests. We send one of these requests and the user has to click or tap a button. This button click/tap will provide us with a one-time notification token, which we can use to send exactly one message. These tokens are valid for 1 year.

Note: this is beta functionality, there be dragons. (See known bugs below.)

Uses

  • Send a follow-up request manually, to get back to the user several days later.

  • Send a follow-up request automatically

    • Outside business hours, because conversations will expire over the weekend.

    • Just before the 24-hour window closes, to keep in touch if support agents are too busy.

Request a token

To request a token, send a new message with type followup_request and a title with a short description. Facebook Messenger will only use the title and put a message around it.

Sending the following payload results in the message shown below:

{ "type": "followup_request", "title": "Stuur iemand later een bericht" }
Example of a notification request in Facebook Messenger

The text ‘Stuur iemand later een bericht’ in the example image above was the content of the title key.

Check token availability

If one or more tokens are available, onetime_notification_available is set to true on the conversation. This property is available in the tenants/<uuid>/conversations/<uuid>/details/ endpoint. Note: this will not affect the expiry of the conversation.

Using the token

A one-time notification token will automatically be used if the conversation is expired and one of these tokens is available. No special request parameters are required.

Known bugs

Clicking the ‘Notify Me’ button on the Facebook website does not call our webhook. Clicking/tapping in the Facebook Messenger app does work. See https://developers.facebook.com/support/bugs/310445676685298/ for status.